Justice League S02E13-14 Review: Eclipso

Justice League, Season 2, Episodes 13-14: Eclipsed

Flash and Hawkgirl are easily the members among the main seven characters who get the least focus. Hawkgirl has her romance with Green Lantern and her little tsundere act, and will get progressively better later down the season, and she's intentionally kept as a secondary character so her gradual personality change and character development can be seen over time instead of done over 40 minutes. But Flash? From being woefully underutilized in the first season -- he only really had a single 'focus' story arc, and that one was basically a filler episode shared with Green Lantern -- and while Flash has got some decent moments in other episodes (the Dr. Destiny one, him flipping out in Vandal's space station), we never had one that really, truly focused on him. He was the comic relief, he was the jokester, he was the kid of the team.

So an episode that thrusts Flash into the forefront is a bit of a rarity. See, out of the seven members of the League, seeing Flash kind of shill out and be more public than the other six is very reasonable. The fact that he shoots his mouth off most of the time ends up not being entertaining but rather quite damning when he falls into the clutches of jackass TV host "Glorious" Gordon Godfrey, who, like any slimy TV host in real-life, twists Flash's words into things that, well, aren't truly the Scarlet Speedster's opinions. The public's negative opinion on superheroes have been slightly touched upon in Superman: TAS, but that's a bit of a different take because, for all the shit he's done, Superman was brainwashed. Flash, meanwhile, shells out for commercials of energy bars, causing the TV hosts to criticize and call out Flash using his powers for profit, and Flash's natural instinct -- to run towards the problem and face it headlong -- ends up causing him to make a bigger fool of himself on live television as Godfrey calls out the Leaguers thinking themselves better than the rest of us humanity.

Green Lantern ends up playing the long-suffering responsible big brother role to Flash, while Diana just doesn't understand the subtleties (or lack thereof) of media propaganda and has more or less the same instinct of action as the Flash does: beat 'em up! Especially with the hilarious line "what's wrong with the way I dress?!" to which Green Lantern and Flash can only basically look at each other and shrug.

The main plot, however, isn't just Flash trying to restore his credibility to the viewers of Glorious Godfrey's TV show. No, the main plot is a new adaptation of Eclipso, one of DC's classic supervillains. The show cuts out all the religious undertones of Eclipso's origin, but plays up the horror of a mystical jewel with unfriendly mystical entities within that possesses anyone who comes to contact with it. The horror aspect of Eclipso's story is definitely played up with a good chunk of the first episode having a group of unlucky soldiers stumble into an ancient desert tomb, with some excellent tense music, shots that are basically the PG-13 version of horror tension buildup, an insane midget who shouts dire warnings to the soldiers, and finally a soldier, possessed and psychopathic, leaving his comrades to be trapped in the tomb while he waltzes out, possessed by Eclipso.

The plot continues to cut back and forth between Eclipso's slow and horrifying ascent as he switches hosts while working his way up the military ladder, while the League (sans Batman, who's the only one absent this episode) discussing how to deal with Godfrey's bullshit claims (3% increase in white collar crime! 50% increase of divorces in marriages!) which, honestly, is something that celebrities and politicians in real life probably have to deal with every day. Superheroes being held at a pedestral and being judged for every single god-damned thing that they do is an aspect of the genre that often gets ignored in more children-oriented adaptations, and it's great to see it tackled here.

The two plotlines intersect at the climax of the first part, with Eclipso's current host donning his comic-book costume to attract the attention of the Justice League, but that's only a ploy to swap hosts and possess Wonder Woman. Sadly the second part is a bit lackluster with a good chunk focused on the insane and irritating Mophir giving the backstory of the Black Diamond in a sequence that kind of kills the pacing...

But Flash fighting the mind-controlled Justice Leaguers is very entertaining as he tries his best to combat all the other League members (bar Batman, who isn't picking up his phone -- I do like it that they recognize his absence and work it into the show), all of whom are invariably superior to Flash in straight-up strength and combat. Meanwhile, Eclipso's other machinations has caused this technobabble device to be launched towards the Sun in order to put the Sun into a state of permanent eclipse, and it's a very nice bit as Flash is forced to mature up and improvise to both rescue his friends from mind-control while racing against the clock before the device reach the sun. The creepy sound effects that the Black Diamond hosts make only serve to increase the horror aspect of the whole situation.

The ending is a bit lackluster, with Flash using a big burst of light to rescue his League members, and then Green Lantern creates a track around the Sun that Flash can run circles around, and him saving the world ends up saving his reputation, too, with an all-too convenient epilogue showing that Godfrey's business and studio is failing and Flash's old agent gets rejected by him and is forced to contend with Mophir. It's a bit of a shame because the buildup of the episode, both on the Eclipso and Glorious Godfrey fronts, are amazing, but the ending is just a generic 'throw a plot device at it and it solves everything', main character learns a lesson. Bit of a shame that this episode ended up being kind of generic.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Black Diamond, in the comics, is the mystical device that keeps Eclipso, the incarnation of god's wrath, in check. While Eclipso himself is not named at all, and the origin is revised to have the Black Diamond be part of a snakeman cult, Eclipso's traditional appearance makes a cameo as the gaudy supervillain costume worn by General MacCormick. 
• Mophir is a minor character from the comics that has more or less a similar role as the ancient guardian of Eclipso's Black Diamond.
• Glorious Godfrey, in the comics, is one of Darkseid's New Gods sent to infiltrate Earth with his powers of hypnosis and mind manipulation to turn humanity away from the Justice League and to welcome the coming of Darkseid. While this episode does not feature Godfrey as anything more than a bit of an asshole TV show host, the fact that the New Gods are a big part of the DCAU lore and Darkseid being indisposed earlier this season might go either way on this Godfrey's status as a New God. (Young Justice would take the Godfrey 'superheroes are scum' role and milk it for all it's worth)
• The advertisement of the Lightspeed energy bars feature Flash beating up Heatwave, Mirror Master and Captain Boomerang, all members of Flash's Rogues. All three would later appear in Justice League Unlimited.
• While running towards the sun, Flash briefly name-drops the Cosmic Treadmill, which in the comics is a super-advanced treadmill that Flash uses to travel through time.